


Ice Cold Winds, But I Am Just Fine

by Lion_owl



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Bisexual Rose Tyler, Canon Compliant, Children of Time (Doctor Who), Gen, Hopeful Ending, Immortal Rose Tyler, Rose and Jack written as platonic but not precluding the possibility of romance, character deaths are mentioned but happen "offscreen", mentioned: Mickey; Martha; Sarah; Donna; Wilf; Gwen & Rhys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26687353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lion_owl/pseuds/Lion_owl
Summary: Trapped in the parallel world, Rose slowly discovers that Jack isn't the only one whose mortality (or lack thereof) was affected by the Bad Wolf.Decades later, after everyone else on that side has died, Rose finds her way back to her original universe and is reunited with an old friend…
Relationships: Gwen Cooper (Pete's World)/Rose Tyler, Jack Harkness & Rose Tyler, Jack Harkness/Rose Tyler, Rose Tyler & Everyone, The Doctor (Doctor Who) & Rose Tyler
Comments: 2
Kudos: 36





	Ice Cold Winds, But I Am Just Fine

Rose Tyler is turning thirty-nine the day she looks in the mirror and realises something: she hasn't aged. She looks twenty-five, and she feels it too.

Very odd.

Perhaps John – that's the name he goes by now, at first it was to be John Smith, but he decided it didn't feel right and settled on John Noble - would be able to offer an explanation.

Only, she doesn't quite feel like contacting him.

She hasn't seen him in, oh, it must be four years now. They still text occasionally, but whatever romantic relationship she had hoped would blossom between them had amounted to very little and then fizzled out within their first year of being stuck here together.

She has never quite understood what went wrong between them, but it no longer matters to her.

A decade ago she had decided it was high time to put back the pieces of her broken heart and move on; and she has moved on: she'd met this universe's counterpart of the Gwen Cooper whom she'd briefly encountered, and been surprised at how quickly they'd hit it off.

This Gwen Cooper didn’t work for Torchwood, and had been yet to encounter any of the true wonders of the universe; and Rose had got to be the one to show her just a few of them. The irony isn't lost on her.

But she is happy.

Truly happy, and she is well and truly over the Doctor.

“Hey,” Gwen says behind her, and Rose turns to see her leaning against the bathroom doorframe. “Happy birthday.”

Rose smiles, “thanks.”

“Are you alright?” Gwen asks.

_‘Aside from the fact that I’m apparently not getting older?’_ Rose thinks. She wonders if Gwen has noticed. For that matter, she wonders why she herself never noticed before; it’s amazing what one can miss when they’re not expecting it. Oh, well. There’ll be plenty of time for wondering, later.

“Yes, I am,” she says. She nods, affirming it to herself as well as Gwen. “I really am.”

She steps away from the mirror and goes to Gwen’s side, kissing her softly. When she steps back, they are both grinning.

“I’m glad,” Gwen says. “We should head downstairs. I think Tony is going to explode with excitement if he has to wait any longer to give you your present.”

By the time Rose is forty-five, she still hasn’t resumed aging, and the elephant in the room is getting more and more difficult for her and her family to ignore. Her mum is going to crack any day now, Rose is certain.

Her wife is fifty, and while Rose thinks the streaks of grey in Gwen’s hair are rather becoming, it’s more and more frequent that people mistake them for mother and daughter, which is uncomfortable to say the least.

She needs answers.

She calls John and asks him to stop by one evening. It’s the first time in a very long time that they’ve seen each other outwith the walls of Torchwood and the professionalism that comes with it. And, as it turns out, they are both very happy to see each other.

When she opens the front door they greet each other with a very long hug, and then she invites him in, makes a large pot of tea, and the two of them spend several hours talking and laughing about the old days, reminiscing on their adventures back when they had a TARDIS, until eventually the conversation lulls into a comfortable silence.

That is, until Gwen gets home, and Rose remembers that they have business to discuss.

“So,” she says, sitting up. “Have you developed any theories as to why I look twenty years younger than I am?”

He leans forward in his chair. “I think it has something to do with Bad Wolf.”

Gwen sits down beside Rose on the sofa, and leans her head on her shoulder. “What’s the Bad Wolf?”

“It’s this phrase we kept seeing and hearing everywhere, when me and the Doctor were first travelling together,” Rose says, threading her fingers through Gwen’s. She glances at John, but he doesn’t show any reaction. “Then it turned out to be this cosmic entity or something that I became part of after I looked into the heart of the TARDIS.” 

“Truth is, we still don’t know that much about it,” John adds. “Except that it is extremely powerful and can create immortality.”

“But if it made me immortal, how did you not work it out at the time? You knew about Jack right away, left him behind, let me believe for ages he was dead.”

“I’ve wondered about that too. My best guess is that it rippled back through your timeline, that it became having always been part of you, and I didn’t notice on the Gamestation because I was already used to it. Whereas with Jack, it fundamentally changed him in that moment.”

“I see,” Rose says quietly.

“All this is still just hypothesis, of course,” John says.

“Are you okay?” Gwen asks her, later on, once they’re tucked up in bed.

“I don’t know,” Rose says, burying her face in Gwen’s neck. “Are you?”

“It’s a lot to take in,” Gwen admits. “But you’re the one who will have to…”

She trails off, but the end of that sentence is clear: _who will have to live with it._

Her mum is first. Jackie Tyler passes away peacefully at the ripe old age of eighty.

It’s weird, Rose thinks as she stands next to Pete and Tony at the funeral; all those times she and her mum visited her dad’s grave and wept together, and now she and her dad – he has become her dad over the years; and he’s the only version of Pete Tyler she knew for more than a few hours – will do the same.

Her dad is next. Pete follows two years after his wife, and is buried beside her.

Gwen Cooper-Tyler cannot be buried beside _her_ wife, as it is abundantly clear that Rose is unlikely to die soon, if ever. But she has a place in the family plot, alongside her in-laws and Mickey’s Grandma.

Burying Tony is the hardest, somehow. John accompanies her, then drives her home and holds her as she cries.

John Noble may be mostly Human and getting old, but is still part Timelord, somewhere, and he makes it to the age of one hundred and twenty – that is, counting the Metacrisis event as ‘birth’, since they have no idea what the fully-Timelord Doctor’s age is – before she has to say goodbye to him as well. He is the last person to be buried with the Tylers, and Rose plants a tree beside them.

She throws herself into her work, after that.

Despite not looking it, she is Torchwood’s oldest and longest-standing employee, and she oversees the entire institution, both in Britain and abroad, so there is plenty to keep her busy all the time. Plenty to keep her from having too much time to think.

At some point the twenty-first century has morphed into the twenty-second, and she rarely shows her face any more to avoid the rumours that are flying around about her apparent (actual) immortality, so it comes as some surprise when an out-of-breath young recruit comes knocking on her office door declaring that one of the laboratories has some news for her.

The news, as it turns out, is that one of the scientists has managed to get the dimension cannon functioning again, and they thought it was worth being taken to the top since the archive reports say that last time it worked, it was because the fabric of the universe was crumbling.

A knot of fear forms in Rose’s chest, but upon inspection of the cannon and a thorough recalibration of the timeline monitors, she comes to the conclusion that it’s nothing more than a tiny rip. Easily enough solved, but it has to be sealed at both sides simultaneously.

Someone has to go to the other side, and stay there.

There’s very little left here for Rose, so she volunteers herself to go.

It’ll take a couple of days for the team to assemble the equipment required to stitch the rip back together again, and in that time, Rose goes to her house for the last time.

She gathers up some clothes, a sleeping bag, a wad of cash she hopes will resemble whatever they’re using on the other side, a selection of jewellery she won’t mind pawning in the event it doesn’t, a tear-out book of psychic paper, and some other provisions, since she will need some time to get herself settled on the other side.

She dusts off the box containing the family photo albums, everyone’s wedding rings, and a few other small bits and pieces; things she never looks at, but can’t bear to leave behind.

She packs the lot into a rucksack, and steps outside find a car, sent from Torchwood, waiting for her. She instructs the driver to stop by the graveyard and goes to say goodbye to her family for the last time.

She takes a cutting from the tree.

Once she arrives back at the institute, her teams have everything ready to go.

“Are you sure about this?” asks Melissa, her second-in-command and soon-to-be successor.

“Someone has to,” Rose says. “It’s probably time I moved on, anyway. You’ll do wonderfully.”

Rose has mentored Melissa since she first joined Torchwood at seventeen, and she will miss her. She pulls the young woman – not young anymore, Rose reminds herself, forty isn’t old, but it isn’t _young_ – into a hug, and blinks back tears.

“Thank you,” Melissa says. “For everything.”

Rose nods, and steps away. “Good luck.”

“You too.”

“When you’re ready, ma’am,” says Taylors, one of the technicians. They lead her to a table next to the dimension cannon, and laid out upon it: a yellow and gold control disc, and a perception filter box, both of which are on necklace chains, a communication earpiece, a handheld scanner, and two torch-like contraptions which they explain is what they will use to seal the hole.

“I’m ready,” she says once she’s geared up, turning to face the team. “Let’s do it.” She presses the disc, and a moment later she materialises in a park, on the edge of a treeline. She pockets the disc, and lifts the scanner, locating the point where the hole is strongest, and points the torch-esque device at it.

Taylors’ voice crackles through the comm: “remember, they must be activated simultaneously.”

“On the count of three then?” Rose says.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay. One… two… three… _now_.”

There’s an awful whining sound, and a misty kind of turquoise glow emanates from the device. She holds it steady. And then it all stops. The scanner indicates that the rip has been sealed, but she already knows that, because her comm is dead. She pulls it from her ear, and shoves all of the equipment into her rucksack, and wanders over to a bench, and just… sits down.

She needs to find a pawnbroker, somewhere to buy food, and a hotel where she can stay at least for tonight and tomorrow. But it’s still light, so she’ll do that in a bit.

_Pete’s World,_ as the Doctor once dubbed that universe, ran ahead of the universe Rose had come from, but only by a few years, which means that when she returns, she will still be in the twenty-second century. Which in turn meant that everyone she’d known here has also died, in her absence.

She looks them up anyway. Mickey first, and discovers that he had married Martha Jones. She’s happy for them both. Then Sarah, and then of course Donna and Wilf. She looks up Gwen Cooper, too: it isn’t _her_ Gwen Cooper, of course, but it feels right to do so anyway.

She visits each of their graves in turn, and leaves flowers.

Well, _almost_ everyone. When she approaches Gwen’s grave, she’s met with a familiar WWII-style coat, and a familiar face…

“ _Jack_?”

He turns, and his jaw drops. “ _Rose_?”

Of course, it makes sense: Gwen was part of his team. And _she_ knew _he_ was immortal. John had explained it to her.

“Is it really you?” he asks.

“Yep, it’s me.”

“But, _how_?”

She’s about to answer, but before she can, he runs towards her, pulling her into a tight hug. She hugs him back, and he lifts her off the ground, swinging her around before her feet hit the ground again. They continue to stand like that for an indeterminate amount of time, and when they pull back they are both crying.

“So it turns out the Bad Wolf made me immortal too, but the Doctor didn’t realise that at the time because it was always part of my timeline,” she says. Then she suddenly feels very, very tired. “Hey, do you mind if we save explanations for later?”

“Of course,” Jack says, turning back to the stone proclaiming itself as the final resting place of Gwen and Rhys Williams. Rose leans against his shoulder, and he wraps an arm around her back, and they stare at the stone in silence, both really glad to have at least one old friend back.

“I married her, you know?” Rose says eventually. “Not your Gwen, obviously. But the one in the other universe. That’s why I came here.”

Jack says nothing, and kisses her forehead. “Are you staying somewhere?” he asks. It’s getting dark, and there’s a nip in the air.

“Around and about,” she says, non-committally.

“You can stay with me if you’d like,” he offers.

“I’d love that.”

He leads the way to his car and they drive back to his flat, stopping en-route for takeaway food, since, Jack explains, he was planning to go to the supermarket that evening, but he can go tomorrow instead.

So they get a chippy dinner, and take it to Jack’s flat, and they eat it in silence, because neither of them have the energy to chat. And after that, Jack offers to sleep on the sofa, and Rose tells him she doesn’t mind sharing, so they change into pyjamas and brush their teeth, and curl up together in Jack’s bed and fall asleep pretty quickly…

Together, they will learn to heal.

“I’m so glad to have found you again,” Rose says the next day, as she and Jack make their way around Tesco.

“And I you,” he agrees. “Makes it all a bit easier, doesn’t it?”

She studiously reads the label on a packet of tortelloni before placing it in the trolley. She thinks he probably understands that sometimes words just aren’t sufficient.

“You said you married Gwen’s counterpart?” he asks once they’re in the car.

“Yeah, she was wonderful,” Rose says, but there’s more to the question: “I don’t think the Doctor could ever have been what I wanted from him. Maybe he thought in different circumstances, John would be… I guess they weren’t different enough people, in the end. Things never really got off the ground.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack says.

“It’s alright. We were good friends. It worked out for the best.”

She thinks of her family and friends, almost all of them dead and gone.

Of Melissa, who she had to leave behind.

She thinks perhaps she understands the Doctor a lot better now.

**Author's Note:**

> She will see the Doctor again, but I'm saving that for a sequel in which she unknowingly meets the companions first (and has a fling with Yaz!)
> 
> Title is from [_I Am The Storm_ by Ad Infinitum](https://youtu.be/SiT9BttZy1M)
> 
> Comments & Kudos are always appreciated!


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